But I didn't want to stay apart. Or go back to the cold, evil bitch I'd become.
I considered all the ways I could make my marriage work while my burning, screaming muscles stroked away at the endless ocean. Nothing solved itself, but I hadn't really expected it to. Eventually, the effort whited out my problems more efficiently than anything else could have. They weren't gone, they were just... under the surface.
The sun went down. It was a beautiful sight, unbounded by the rules of land - nothing but waves and sea, and an endless bowl of sky. I had to stop more and more frequently and just let myself float. My body hurt so much I cried involuntary, hiccuping tears. Every deliberate movement felt as if my nerves had grown cutting edges and were slicing themselves right out of my skin. My skin felt rubbery and ice-cold, except for my back, which just felt like it wasn't there at all.
Keep going.
I tried, but my efforts came slower, my rests more frequent. I just couldn't keep moving.
My energy reserves were gone, and although the world was rich in it all around me, I couldn't tap it like a Djinn could.
I'm going to die out here.Except that I couldn't die, not without breaking the tie to David.
Not without setting him on a path of destruction that would annihilate everything.
The stars came out in thick white veils of light, and I floated on my back in the bobbing waves, too tired to keep moving at any cost.
I slept for a while. I floated.
I think I went a little insane, as the endless, isolated hours passed. Then I swam again, and then I slept.
Eventually, I dreamed I heard a ship's horn.
My ride's here,I thought. It was crazy, but somehow it all made sense, the way dreams sometimes do when you're stuck in the middle - life was an ocean, death was a ship to take me away to lands unknown. I'd bought the ticket, right? So why not take the ride?
I heard the blast of noise again, mournful and musical at the same time.
A spotlight appeared out of nowhere and hit the water, so bright I yelled and covered my eyes.
"We've caught ourselves a mermaid," someone said, from behind the blaze of light. "Fish her out. Let's see what we've landed."
I didn't realize how much of the sea I'd swallowed until I was out of the ocean. I promptly fell to my hands and knees and vomited up enough foamy water to fill a goldfish bowl or two. I rolled onto my side, and continued hacking up frothing mouthfuls. My lungs were on fire from the inside, and my throat felt like I'd gargled with Clorox.
My head throbbed like thunder. My skin felt rubbery and soft, and I was incredibly dizzy.
"Huh," somebody said, and I threw up clots of white foam on a pair of sturdy-looking black paramilitary boots. "She don't look like much, Josue." The hot searchlight was still beaming down on me from a stubby upper deck. In comparison to the majestic cruise ship, this looked like a stunted dwarf - a working ship, some kind of smallish freighter. Not very well kept. The metal deck around me was spotted with rust, there were careless piles of rope and haphazardly stacked boxes, and the men standing over me didn't look like the shipshape type, either. There were four of them, all in filthy, grease-stained T-shirts, cargo-type pants or shorts, and nonskid work boots.
And they all carried knives and guns. Two of them had their firearms shoved casually into waistbands; the other two had what looked like automatic machine pistols slung on bandoliers across their chests.
I was pretty sure those weren't standard issue for guys on board most cargo ships.
I coughed some more. I tried to sit up. I was, instead, yanked all the way to my feet, where I wavered and nearly went down again. Gravity seemed like a very strange concept to me, after all that time in the water.
I tried my voice, which came out as rusty as the ship I was standing on. "Thanks for the rescue."
One of them laughed. He was the one who'd declared me alive, I thought, a big, muscular guy the color of mahogany. He looked like he could bite a metal bar and spit bullets. As rescuers went, not exactly comforting.
But I couldn't help but be relieved that the whole survival thing had been taken out of my hands.
"Hola,"the big guy - apparently, Josue - said, and aimed his machine pistol somewhere in the direction of a number of my more important internal organs. "Is your name Joanne Baldwin?"
I frankly stared at him. "What?"
"Yes or no, mermaid. Joanne Baldwin?" He had an interesting accent to his English - thick, not quite Spanish, more lyrical and unpredictable. Close cousins, though. Portuguese, maybe. "If you're not, I throw you back. I don't have room for pets."
"In that case I'm definitely Joanne." I swallowed another cough. "Somebody told you to look for me. Who?"
"Why? Enemies would have left you sucking water, eh? Must have been friends." He had a point. I couldn't imagine these guys doing anything without a profit motive, and I hadn't pissed off anyone bad enough to make them spend a lot of money to kill me. Easy enough to just let me drown.
Wait... that meant it was someone who'd known I would be in the water.
"You didn't come all the way out here to find me," I said. Josue raised his eyebrows and smiled, not in a comforting sort of way.
"Came for the salvage on the ship that went down," he said. "Stayed for the profits. You're worth a lot of money, mermaid."
"Alive, I guess."
He shrugged. "Apparently."
This ship was far from an honest sort of vessel. They'd picked up the maritime distress calls from the Grand Paradise - I assumed the captain had sent them - and of course the lifeboats would have transponders on them, probably sending out automated rescue calls.
And in these waters, that would draw two kinds of vessels: well-meaning Good Samaritans, and the kind of ship I'd just been fished onto.
In other words, pirates. And somebody had co-opted them to search specifically for me.
"Look!" said one of the crew, stationed at the railing. He called for light, and the beam burned out into the water, turning it from black to a muddy, sullen blue. At first I didn't see what he was looking at, and then I caught a glimpse of bobbing wood. A few bits of debris from the ship had followed the same currents I'd used. There was plenty of small, buoyant wreckage still around, though the debris cloud had long since dissipated and spread itself out over dozens of miles of open water. Not much of a grave for such an enormous vessel.
"Everybody get off?" the pirate captain asked me, and shoved me with the barrel of his gun when I delayed my answer. "Everybody in those little boats, yes?"
"You bet," I said. "Everybody's been rescued. Well, everybody but me, obviously." He seemed disappointed. I guessed he'd been hoping to fish out some rich Americans he could ransom back at a significant profit. I didn't blame him; I didn't look like a rich payday, regardless of what his patron had told him.
"How come you didn't end up on a rescue boat, mermaid? You not fresh enough?" A couple of his crewmates offered helpful commentary about how yummy I looked.